Microcircuit cards, also known as "smart" cards, are now on sale for use with public pay phones, and such cards may have a value of 40 or 120 telephone charge units, for example. The advantage is clear: since card-accepting public phones do not contain any money they will not be broken into.
Drawbacks lie in amoritizing the cost of setting up such a smart card system and in meeting the on-going cost of dispensing suitable smart cards. These cards can be obtained not only from official telephone services, but also from numerous other retail outlets which must be paid for providing this service.
French patent application No. 86 00511 filed Jan. 15, 1986 in the name of the present applicant, describes an automatic dispenser for smart cards, which dispenser is suitable for dispensing telephone cards. Such machines reduce the cost of dispensing cards. However, they bring back the problem of machines being broken into: since smart card dispensing machines contain money, they will be worth robbing. This danger can be reduced by placing such dispensing machines in crowded locations or in locations which are under constant surveillance. However this solution is not capable of general application.
The present applicant seeks to improve the safety of smart card dispensing machines.
Thus, one aim of the invention is to provide an automatic smart card dispensing machine in which the stock of undispensed cards has no monetary value.
Another aim of the invention is to enable a smart card whose credit has been exhausted to be re-validated (i.e. reprogrammed).